The Mammoth Book of Merlin

Charles de Lint (b. 1951) has established a strong reputation in his fantasies drawing upon the roots of British folklore. A Canadian by birth, de Lint is a musician as well as a writer, specializing in folk music, and also operates his own small press called Triskell Press, which published his earliest writings, including the various tales of Cerin Songweaver, a medieval minstrel. Charles’s stories are seldom far from the basis of myth and legend, such as Mulengro (1985) and Greenmantle (1988) and his retelling of the fairy tale Jack, the Giant-Killer (1987). More recently his work has become darker and sinister taking on the pressures and horrors of American city life, but a thread of the elder world remains. The following story was originally published in the American series Pulphouse in 1990. It brings the Merlin legend down to the present day.

In the heart of the tree lived an old man who wore the shape of a red-haired boy with crackernut eyes that seemed as bright as salmon tails glinting up the water.

His was a riddling wisdom, older by far than the ancient oak that housed his body. The green sap was his blood and leaves grew in his hair. In the winter, he slept. In the spring, the moon harped a windsong against his antler tines as the oak’s boughs stretched its green buds awake. In the summer, the air was thick with the droning of bees and the scent of the wildflowers that grew in stormy profusion where the fat brown bole became root.

And in the autumn, when the tree loosed its bounty to the ground below, there were hazelnuts lying in among the acorns.

She was sitting on the end of her bed, looking out the window over the garden, her guitar on her lap, the quilt bunched up under her knees. Up by the headboard, Julie Simms leaned forward from its carved wood to look over Sara’s shoulder at what could be seen of the garden from their vantage point.

It was 1969 and they had decided to form a folk band – Sara on guitar, Julie playing recorder, both of them singing. They wanted to change the world with music because that was what was happening. In San Francisco. In London. In Vancouver. So why not in Ottawa?

With their faded bell-bottom jeans and tie-dyed shirts, they looked just like any of the other seventeen-year-olds who hung around the War Memorial downtown, or could be found crowded into coffee houses like Le Hibou and Le Monde on the weekends. Their hair was long – Sara’s a cascade of brown ringlets, Julie’s a waterfall spill the color of a raven’s wing; they wore beads and feather earrings and both eschewed makeup.

The dreaminess in Sara’s eyes became wistful and she gave Julie a rueful smile.

It was three years after her parents had died – when she was nine years old – that Sara Kendell came to live with her Uncle Jamie in his strange rambling house. To an adult perspective, Tamson House was huge: an enormous, sprawling affair of corridors and rooms and towers that took up the whole of a city block; to a child of nine, it simply went on forever.

She could wander down corridor after corridor, poking about in the clutter of rooms that lay spread like a maze from the northwest tower near Bank Street – where her bedroom was located – all the way over to her uncle’s study overlooking O’Conner Street on the far side of the house, but mostly she spent her time in the library and in the garden. She liked the library because it was like a museum. There were walls of books, rising two floors high up to a domed ceiling, but there were also dozens of glass display cases scattered about the main floor area, each of which held any number of fascinating objects.

There were insects pinned to velvet and stone artifacts; animal skulls and clay flutes in the shapes of birds; old manuscripts and hand-drawn maps, the parchment yellowing, the ink a faded sepia; Kabuki masks and a miniature Shinto shrine made of ivory and ebony; corn-husk dolls, Japanese netsuke and porcelain miniatures; antique jewelry and African beadwork; Kachina dolls and a brass fiddle, half the size of a normal instrument . . .

The cases were so cluttered with interesting things that she could spend a whole day just going through one case and still have something to look at when she went back to it the next day. What interested her most, however, was that her uncle had a story to go with each and every item in the cases. No matter what she brought up to his study – a tiny ivory netsuke carved in the shape of a badger crawling out of a teapot, a flat stone with curious scratches on it that looked like Ogham script – he could spin out a tale of its origin that might take them right through the afternoon to suppertime.

That he dreamed up half the stories only made it more entertaining, for then she could try to trip him up in his rambling explanations, or even just try to top his tall tales.

But if she was intellectually precocious, emotionally she still carried scars from her parents’ death and the time she’d spent living with her other uncle – her father’s brother. For three years Sara had been left in the care of a nanny during the day – amusing herself while the woman smoked cigarettes and watched the soaps – while at night she was put to bed promptly after dinner. It wasn’t a normal family life; she could only find that vicariously in the books she devoured with a voracious appetite.

Coming to live with her Uncle Jamie, then, was like constantly being on holiday. He doted on her and on those few occasions when he was too busy, she could always find one of the many house guests to spend some time with her.

She wasn’t frightened of the house itself Nor of bogies or monsters living in her closet. She knew that shadows were shadows, creaks and groans were only the house settling when the temperature changed. What haunted her nights was waking up from a deep sleep, shuddering uncontrollably, her pajamas stuck to her like a second skin, her heartbeat thundering at twice its normal tempo.

There was no logical explanation for the terror that gripped her – once, sometimes twice a week. It just came, an awful, indescribably panic that left her shivering and unable to sleep for the rest of the night.

It was on the days following such nights that she went into the garden. The greenery and flowerbeds and statuary all combined to soothe her. Invariably, she found herself in the very center of the garden where an ancient oak tree stood on a knoll and overhung a fountain. Lying on the grass sheltered by its boughs, with the soft lullaby of the fountain’s water murmuring close at hand, she would find what the night fears had stolen from her the night before.

“The garden has a name, too,” she told her uncle when she came in from sleeping under the oak one day.

The house was so big that many of the rooms had been given names just so that they could all be kept straight in their minds.

He uncle nodded. “‘The dream of life among men.’ It’s a good name. Did you think it up yourself?”

Her uncle started to explain, astonished that in all her reading she hadn’t come across a reference to Britain’s most famous wizard, but then just gave her a copy of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and, after a moment’s consideration, T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone as well.

“Did you ever have an imaginary friend when you were a kid?” Sara asked as she finally turned away from the window.

Julie shrugged. “My mom says I did, but I can’t remember. Apparently he was a hedgehog the size of a toddler named Whatzit.”

“I never did. But I can remember that for a long time I used to wake up in the middle of the night just terrified and then I wouldn’t be able to sleep again for the rest of the night. I used to go into the middle of the garden the next day and sleep under that big oak that grows by the fountain.”

Sara grinned. “But the thing is, I used to dream that there was a boy living in that tree and his name was Merlin.”

“No, really. I mean, I really had these dreams. The boy would just step out of the tree and we’d sit there and talk away the afternoon.”

“I don’t remember,” Sara said. “Not the details – just the feeling. It was all very magical and . . . healing, I suppose. Jamie said that my having those night fears was just my unconscious mind’s way of dealing with the trauma of losing my parents and then having to live with my dad’s brother who only wanted my inheritance, not me. I was too young then to know anything about that kind of thing; all I knew was that when I talked to Merlin, I felt better. The night fears started coming less and less often and then finally they went away altogether.

“The boy in the tree,” Julie said. “Your Merlin. When did you stop dreaming about him?”

“I don’t really know. I guess when I stopped waking up terrified, I just stopped sleeping under the tree so I didn’t see him anymore. And then I just forgot that he’d ever been there . . .”

“Thanks a lot. At least I didn’t hang around with a giant hedgehog named Whatzit when I was a kid.”

Julie started to giggle and then they both broke up. It was a few moments before either of them could catch their breath.

Another giggle welled up in Julie’s throat, but Sara’s gaze had drifted back out the window and become all dreamy again.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I was just looking out at the garden and I suddenly found myself remembering. I wonder what ever happened to him . . .?”

“Jamie gave me some books about a man with the same name as you,” she told the red-haired boy the next time she saw him. “And after I read them, I went into the library and found some more. He was quite famous, you know.”

“But it’s all so confusing,” Sara went on. “There’s all these different stories, supposedly about the same man . . . How are you supposed to know which of them is true?”

“That’s what happens when legend and myth meet,” the boy said. “Everything gets tangled.”

“But that’s not to say there was never a man named Merlin,” the boy added. “He might have been a bard, or a follower of old wisdoms. His enchantments might have been more subtle than the great acts of wizardry ascribed to him in the stories.”

“And did he end up in a tree?” Sara asked eagerly. “That would make him like you. I’ve also read that he got trapped in a cave, but I think a tree’s much more interesting, don’t you?”

“The stories seem to be saying that one shouldn’t teach, or else the student becomes too knowledgeable and then turns on the teacher. I don’t believe that. It’s not the passing on of knowledge that would root someone like Merlin.”

“Getting too tangled up in his own quest for understanding. Delving so deeply into the calendaring trees that he lost track of where he left his body until one day he looked around to find that he’d become what he was studying.”

“Why not?” Sara asked, her mind still bubbling with the tales of quests and wizards and knights that she’d been reading. “Were you enchanted? Are you trapped in that oak tree?”

She was full of curiosity and determined to find out all she could, but in that practiced way that the boy had, he artfully turned the conversation onto a different track and she never did get an answer to her questions.

It rained that night, but the next night the skies were clear. The moon hung above the Mondream Wood like a fat ball of golden honey; the stars were so bright and close Sara felt she could just reach up, and pluck one as though it were an apple, hanging in a tree. She had crept from her bedroom in the northwest tower and gone out into the garden, stepping secretly as a thought through the long darkened corridors of the house until she was finally outside.

Dreams were one thing. She knew the difference between what you found in a dream and when you were awake; between a fey red-haired boy who lived in a tree and real boys; between the dreamlike enchantments of the books she’d been reading – enchantments that lay thick as acorns under an oak tree – and the real world where magic was a card trick, or a stage magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat on the Ed Sullivan Show.

But the books also said that magic came awake in the night. It crept from its secret hidden places – called out by starlight and the moon – and lived until the dawn pinked the eastern skies. She always dreamed of the red-haired boy when she slept under his oak in the middle of the garden. But what if he was more than a dream? What if at night he stepped out of his tree – really and truly, flesh and blood and bone real?

Sara felt restless after Julie went home. She put away her guitar and then distractedly set about straightening up her room. But for every minute she spent on the task, she spent three just looking out the window at the garden.

Which couldn’t be true. Everything she’d read about sleep had to dream. People just needed to. Dreams were supposed to be the way your subconscious cleared up the day’s clutter. So, ipso facto, everybody dreamed. She just didn’t remember hers.

But I did when I was a kid, she thought. Why did I stop? How could I have fogotten the red-haired boy in the tree?

Dusk fell outside her window to find her sitting on the floor, arms folded on the windowsill, chin resting on her arms as she looked out over the garden. As the twilight deepened, she finally stirred. She gave up the pretense of cleaning up her room. Putting on a jacket, she went downstairs and out into the garden.

Eschewing the paths that patterned the garden, she walked across the dew-wet grass, fingering the damp leaves of the bushes and the low-hanging branches of the trees. The dew made her remember Gregor Penev – an old Bulgarian artist who’d been staying in the house when she was a lot younger. He’d been full of odd little stories and explanations for natural occurrences – much like Jamie was which was probably why Gregor and her uncle had gotten along so well.

“Zaplakala e gorata,” he’d replied when she’d asked him where dew came from and what it was for. “The forest is crying. It remembers the old heroes who lived under its branches – the heroes and the magicians, all lost and gone now. Robin Hood. Indje Voivode. Myrddin.”

Myrddin. That was another name for Merlin. She remembered reading somewhere that Robin Hood was actually a Christianized Merlin, the Anglo version of his name being a variant of his Saxon name of Rof Breocht Woden – the Bright Strength of Wodan. But if you went back far enough, all the names and stories got tangled up in one story. The tales of the historical Robin Hood, like those of the historical Merlin of the Borders, had acquired older mythic elements common to the world as a whole by the time they were written down. The story that their legends were really telling was that of the seasonal hero-king, the May Bride’s consort, who with his cloak of leaves and his horns, and all his varying forms, was the secret truth that lay in the heart of every forest.

“But those are European heroes,” she remembered telling Gregor. “Why would the trees in our forest be crying for them?”

“All forests are one,” Gregor had told her, his features serious for a change. “They are all echoes of the first forest that gave birth to Mystery when the world began.”

She hadn’t really understood him then, but she was starting to understand him now as she made her way to the fountain at the center of the garden where the old oak tree stood guarding its secrets in the heart of the Mondream Wood. There were two forests for every one you entered. There was the one you walked in, the physical echo, and then there was the one that was connected to all the other forests, with no consideration of distance, or time.

The forest primeval. Remembered through the collective memory of every tree in the same way that people remembered myth – through the collective subconscious that Jung mapped, the shared mystic resonance that lay buried in every human mind. Legend and myth, all tangled in an alphabet of trees, remembered, not always with understanding, but with wonder. With awe.

Why the Green Man had antlers – because a stag’s tines are like the branches of a tree.

Why so many of the early avatars were hung from a tree. Osiris. Balder. Dionysus. Christ.

Sara stood in the heart of the Mondream Wood and looked up at the old oak tree. The moon lay behind its branches, mysteriously close. The air was filled with an electric charge, as though a storm was approaching, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

Sara grew to be a small woman, but at nine years old she was just a tiny waif – no bigger than a minute, as Jamie liked to say. With her diminutive size she could slip soundlessly through thickets that would allow no egress for an adult. And that was how she went.

She was a curly-haired gamine, ghosting through the hawthorn hedge that bordered the main path. Whispering across the small glade guarded by the statue of a little horned man that Jamie said was Favonius, but she privately thought of as Peter Pan, though he bore no resemblance to the pictures in her Barrie book. Tiptoeing through the wildflower garden, a regular gallimaufry of flowering plants, both common and exotic. And then she was near the fountain. She could see Merlin’s oak, looming up above the rest of the garden like the lordly tree it was.

She crept nearer, a small shadow hidden in deeper patches cast by the fat yellow moon.

“—never a matter of choice,” a man’s voice was saying. “The lines of our lives are laid out straight as a dodman’s leys, from event to event. You chose your road.”

She couldn’t see the speaker, but the timbre of his voice was deep and resonating, like a deep bell. She couldn’t recognize it, but she did recognize Merlin’s when he replied to the stranger.

“When I chose my road, there was no road. There was only the trackless wood; the hills, lying crest to crest like low-backed waves; the glens where the harps were first imagined and later strung. Ca’canny, she told me when I came into the Wood. I thought go gentle meant go easy, not go fey; that the oak guarded the Borders, marked its boundaries. I never guessed it was a door.”

“But when your part was done,” the stranger said, “you continued to meddle.”

There was a long silence then. Sara had an itch on her nose but she didn’t dare move a hand to scratch it. She mulled over what she’d overheard, trying to understand.

It was all so confusing. From what they were saying it seemed that her Merlin was the Merlin in the stories. But if that was true, then why did he look like a boy her own age? How could he even still be alive? Living in a tree in Jamie’s garden and talking to his father . . .

“I’m tired,” Merlin said. “And this is an old argument, Father. The winters are too short. I barely step into a dream and then it’s spring again. I need a longer rest. I’ve earned a longer rest. The Summer Stars call to me.”

“You knew. But you preferred to ignore what you knew because you had to riddle it all. The salmon wisdom of the hazel wasn’t enough. You had to partake of the fruit of every tree.”

“I can’t be found, I can’t be seen,” Merlin said. “What they remember of me is so tangled up in Romance, that no one can find the man behind the tales. Who is there to love me?”

Sara pushed her way out of the thicket where she’d been hiding and stepped into the moonlight.

There was no red-haired boy standing by the tree. Instead, she found an old man with the red-haired boy’s eyes. And a stag. The stag turned its antlered head toward her and regarded her with a gaze that sent shivers scurrying up and down her spine. For a long moment its gaze held hers, then it turned, its flank flashing red in the moonlight, and the darkness swallowed it.

Sara shivered. She wrapped her arms around herself, but she could not escape the chill.

That was impossible. The garden had always been strange, seeming so much larger than its acreage would allow, but there couldn’t possibly be a deer living in it without her having seen it before. Except . . . What about a boy becoming an old man overnight? A boy who really and truly did live in a tree?

Memories flooded Sara. She remembered a hundred afternoons of warm companionship. All those hours of quiet conversation and games. The peace that came from her night fears. If she said yes, then he’d go away. She’d lose her friend. And the night fears . . . Who’d be there to make the terrors go away? Only he had been able to help her. Not Jamie nor anyone else who lived in the house, though they’d all tried.

He nodded. An old man’s nod. But the eyes were still young. Young and old, wise and silly, all at the same time. Her red-haired boy’s eyes.

“You won’t have a choice,” Merlin said. “Your memories of me would come with me when I go.”

That was worse than losing a friend. That was like the friend had never been there in the first place.

“I could try to send them back to you when I reach the other side of the river.”

Sara blinked with confusion. “What do you mean? The other side of what river?”

“The Region of the Summer Stars lies across the water that marks the boundary between what is and what has been. It’s a long journey to that place. Sometimes it takes many lifetimes.”

They were both quiet then. Sara studied the man that her friend had become. The gaze he returned her was mild. There were no demands in it. There was only regret. The sorrow of parting. A fondness that asked for nothing in return.

One moment they were embracing and the next her arms only held air. She let them fall limply to her sides. The weight of an awful sorrow bowed her head. Her throat grew thick, her chest tight. She swayed where she stood, tears streaming from her eyes.

But the next thing she knew she was waking in her bed in the northwest tower and it was the following morning. She woke from a dreamless sleep, clear-eyed and smiling. She didn’t know it, but her memories of Merlin were gone.

The older Sara, still not a woman, but old enough to understand more of the story now, fingered a damp leaf and looked up into the spreading canopy of the oak above her.

The electric charge she’d felt in the air when she’d approached the old oak was gone. That pregnant sense of something about to happen had faded. She was left with the moon, hanging lower now, the stars still bright, the garden quiet. It was all magical, to be sure, but natural magic – not supernatural.

She sighed and kicked at the autumn debris that lay thick about the base of the old tree. Browned leaves, broad and brittle. And acorns. Hundreds of acorns. Fred the gardener would be collecting them soon for his compost – at least those that the black squirrels didn’t hoard away against the winter. She went down on one knee and picked up a handful of them, letting them spill out of her hand.

Something different about one of them caught her eye as it fell and she plucked it up from the ground. It was a small brown ovoid shape, an incongruity in the crowded midst of all the capped acorns. She held it up to her eye. Even in the moonlight she could see what it was.

Had she regained her memories, memories returned to her now from a place where the Summer Stars always shone, or had she just had a dream in the Mondream Wood where as a child she’d thought that the trees dreamed they were people?

MERLIN DREAMS IN THE MONDREAM WOOD

CHARLES DE LINT